I'll drink to that. I got the NES and SNES emulators working on the Wii, and in all honesty I haven't played many modern games since. Getting back into the Megaman and Final Fantasy series is a pretty neat experience, especially on a new HDTV with a wireless controller. All my childhood dreams of having remote access to all of my games without having to blow in the cartridge have finally come true. Now kindly get off my lawn!

You've obviously never used Linux on the PS3 at all and are trolling.
I've used my bluetooth keyboard on Linux with the PS3 since first installing it 2 years ago. That's on YDL, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
Secondly, all the RAM has been usable for some time now so once again you are trolling.

I haven't been keeping track of consoles much, but I can imagine that being true, from how many kids I've (dismayingly) heard talking about their XBoxes. Also, many kids and adults (a niche market which Playstations have traditionally been strong in) have gone with Wii.

I've definitely do idea on the veracity of those figures. BUT, even if they've lost a ton of money on PS3, there is perhaps still light at the end of the tunnel for Sony. They based it on Cell, which is designed to scale easily. If that really happened in practice, and if the PS3 didn't bypass all that and just use the raw power without the scaleability, then it should be a relatively simple process to make a PS4, based on their existing, mass-producible tech, but with a few more Cell chips on the bus.

I said 'last time I checked' the bluetooth did not work, after which I haven't bothered to check on it again because it was already obvious it sucks for anything but Cell development.

And using the ps3vram driver you do _not_ have full access to the 256 MB video RAM, you can use it, but the bandwidth is terrible because it actually uses the GPU to DMA memory back and forth to a window in (directly accessible) XDR memory, because the bandwidth of the 2nd half of memory to the CPU is about 8MB/s (or something similarly slow, you get the point). The way it's used with ps3vram this is only useful as swap space, and even then swapping to the HD is almost as fast.

You obviously don't really know much about how PS3 linux works at all and are astroturfing.

It strikes me that people who try to hype up the PS3's emulation under linux have never tried it.

I have, ignoring the large amount of tweaking to get a distro working properly with the PS3 hardware/HDTV (I've tried yellow dog and ubuntu), the emulation just isn't very good.

At least with an NES emulator you'll be able to run a game at full speed. However, good luck getting it fit to the screen properly or get it working with PS3 gamepad (again more tweaking). Other systems, SNES, GENESIS, don't have an emulator that is going to run at full speed on the PS3.

Other software suffers from the same problems, lack of selection and slow performance. Maybe this will change in the future, but right now linux on the cell isn't that great for desktop style apps. Yet I see it hyped up all the time, but people who either haven't bothered to try it, or are fine with a lot of tweaking for a extremely sluggish emulation/desktop experience. Just because you can do it, doesn't always mean that it is worth doing.

Which frankly was about the stupidest damn thing they could have ever done! Hell I wouldn't be surprised if it was 360 supporters writing all those "supercomputing on PS3" articles, because Sony takes a bath on the sale of every PS3 and has to try to make it up in software(which last I saw the all important games-to-console sell through ratio was 8-1 for 360 and 3-1 for PS3 so they are getting crucified) and when you buy a cluster of PS3s they are taking a bath MULTIPLE times and are never going to see squat in profit because nobody is building clusters to game with, therefor no sell through. If I was the head of Sony the guy that came up with that "cluster of PS3s for supercomputing" BS would be living in a van down by the river.

Of course the hard part for a PC gamer in all this "360 VS PS3" is that BOTH companies are giant douchebags so it kinda makes it hard to root for anybody. Sadly after the rootkit, the funky proprietary formats, and screwing PS3 owners by sticking an expensive BD player in the PS3 just to win a VHS/Betamax format war I'm going to have to go with Sony being the bigger douche this round. MSFT, after getting their asses royally handed to them over the RROD has at least boosted the warranty and from what my console gamer buddies tell me the new 360s are actually good. Sony on the other hand with their "we WANT [slashdot.org] the console to be hard to develop for" gets double douche points for trying to be elitist while being stuck firmly in last place everywhere on the planet except Japan.

He's getting upset at people criticising him for playing with linux on it. That's what. That all these people pretending to be geeks are now criticising folks for playing with new things on new systems.

You want it to play games, fine, but asking why he plays with other options for it, telling him (or me for that matter) that it's stupid and a waste off time is not acceptable, intelligent or inquisitive.

What if Torvalds had rolled over and decided Linux was a waste of time because it would be quicker just to buy windows?

You think that is great? Get a big screen TV and play Super Mario Bros. 3 on big world.

Oh God, the pixels, the pixels are coming to get me!!!!

It depends on which emulator you're using. If you're using the official Virtual Console emulator, it'll look blocky because vcNES uses nearest-neighbor resampling. But if you're using an emulator that supports Scale2x [sourceforge.net], hq2x [hiend3d.com], or some other smart resampling method for line art, you can get NES games to look better than TG16 in some cases and Super NES games to look nearly PS1-quality.

There are several projects, like spu-medialib [sourceforge.net] and mesa3d [sourceforge.net], which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU. Why don't you put some of those people you say you're training to program the Cell onto those projects and give something back to the community that's given you the programmable platform?

Listen, I've tried PS3 linux before, I know what the hardware is, and I know what the limitations of PS3 linux are. These have not changed (apart from the bluetooth thing), and these are not bound to change. ie: the 2nd half of memory will always be basically useless, and the RSX will never be fully accessible from PS3 linux.

So effectively, there is no hope PS3 linux will get more useful than it already is, which is how it was when I checked it out. I've been running it for a few months which was about a year ago, and back then it broke 3 times on firmware updates. How you would know better how much time I spent with it eludes me...

If you don't believe what I'm saying about PS3 linux: go ahead and try it anyway, I couldn't care less, not my PS3, not my spare time. Just find out yourself how terrific it works and how much I'm trolling here. Don't see why I would be trolling about PS3 linux on Slashdot anyway but hey, some people here obviously feel better screaming troll all the time.

I'm running FVWM (on Etch) on a Latitude CPI (266mhz, 128mb RAM). It runs _relatively_ well. I can only imagine the PS3, even given the memory and GPU limitations, will emulate (16bit or less) gaming systems without much trouble.

Don't worry. There's a lot of PS3 haters out there, and they love to be heard. The folks that like the PS3 don't care enough to post how much they enjoy the system.

I have a PS3 and I like it a lot. I don't play too many games on it, but I do play some. I play a lot of media with it - it's my main media head to my collecton of music, movies, etc. The uPNP media support is superb.

I have played around with Linux on it a lot and it's great being able to do so. Boots a little slow, but it works pretty well.

I like that I can attach any USB mouse, keyboard, drive, etc to it. I like that I can charge the controllers with my cell phone charger.

And I have about 40 bluray movies to play on it so far.

It's a great machine. Never a glitch or problem to speak of. It just works, and it's fun. I don't really care if 360 sales are higher. Why would anyone? Does that make the PS3 any less awesome to me?

One of my pals here in SoCal is getting closer and closer to destroying the hypervisor restrictions. He's managed to get a few commands directly to GPU and memory, and once he figures out how to get all commands to it (although from what I'm told there is a performance hit of about 40%, for reasons I'm not technically competent enough to understand,) then it's going to be a much more fun system to play with. Hell, if I could run games and whatnot through the PS3 with Linux I'd unhook my PC from the TV and just let the PS3 handle it instead. There is serious power potential in the PS3. Sony should have unlocked it and dropped the price another 50 bucks. I'm willing to bet that would have a LOT of new customers coming to it.